We first installed Windows Vista onto a clean drive partition, then the latest hardware drivers were sourced and installed. Finally the system was fully patched (as of 25th March 2008) up to but not including Service Pack 1.

The drives were then cleaned (in the case of file copy testing), defragmented and rebooted between each test run. Each run was also done three times in order to get an accurate average result. After installing SP1 the drives were again defragmented using the Windows defrag utility.

In addition the Vista OS was set up in the same way that we always do in order to minimise the differences between individual test runs: File Indexing and Aero were left on, while ReadyBoost, Superfetch and System Protection were all disabled.

Boot Times

We tested the boot time from AFTER the system had successfully completed its POST procedure because this is independent of the OS booting and we took an average of three runs in succession.

Boot Times

Average of three runs

Windows Vista 32-bit SP1

Windows Vista 32-bit non-SP1

48.0

40.8

0

10

20

30

40

50

Time in Seconds (lower is better)

On average, the SP1 machine booted several seconds slower than the non-SP1 machine. There are no extra visible elements in the boot process – it just does slightly more, which ends up making it a bit slower.

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